REFERENCE SERVICES
ILS-504
Reference and Information Resources and Services – Although I felt competent as a researcher before
taking this class, it certainly introduced me to a wealth of print and online
resources I had never used before.
Proper reference interview technique was also emphasized. In answering the questions posed for
class assignments, there was no opportunity to actually conduct interviews, but
I always formatted my responses to illustrate proper technique, including the
all important closing comment. This
portfolio includes a document containing a sample of the many reference
questions answered during the course of the class.
ILS-604
Advanced Reference Materials and Services – The class first solidified work done in ILS 506 with
a general reference question assignment and one that required the use of
EBSCO. Later reference questions
were answered using DIALOG, and though I may never use Dialog in my public
library work, the study of this aggregator’s various interfaces was helpful in
refining online query technique.
Examples of reference questions answered with Dialog can be found in
Sample I and Sample II.
Also in
ILS-604 I wrote an Analysis of Email
Reference Services available at that time, and based on that analysis, designed
an Email Reference Form to be used in such a service.
ILS-695
Online Information Retrieval – This
course was actually taken on campus and included instructional presentations by
major aggregators. The course particularly expanded my knowledge in the area of
citation-based research. For the
major project, a narrow topic was selected as a means to facilitate a comparison
of information vendors including, Thompson’s ISI, LexisNexis, DIALOG, EBSCO, and the Google search
engine.